Dr. Itai Kela is the Head of The Healthtech Sector in the Israel Innovation Authority. Dr. Kela role is to nurture and develop healthtech innovation resources, while creating and strengthening the infrastructure and framework needed to support the healthtech industry and its ecosystem to promote Israel economic growth. In the era of the Covid-19 epidemic crisis, Dr. Kela role is to build Israel national strategic preparedness and response plan to epidemic threats and to define the actions and infrastructures required to stop further transmission of Covid-19 within Israel and in order to be prepared to the next outbreak. Dr. Kela has developed the newly launched strategic program in the Israeli Innovation authority, the “Bio-convergence program”, which defined as the next growth engine of the Israeli economy and serve as the scientific director of the Bio-convergence national program. Dr. Itai Kela has over 15 years of experience in leading product development programs, specializing in drug development, cell therapy, immune oncology and genomic based personalized medicine. Dr. Kela proficiency is characterization of market needs and trends to define strategic development path. Dr. Kela has a proven track record of meeting business development targets and led international collaborations with multinational corporations, research institutes and hospitals in the US and Europe. Before joining the Israel Innovation Authority, Dr. Kela held a variety of executive positions in healthtech fastgrowing companies, NRGene, Stem Cell Medicine and Protalix (NASDAQ:PLX). Dr. Itai Kela holds a PhD in cancer genomics and computational biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and specialized in immune oncology and computational genomics from the Stanford University. Dr. Kela received “The Center of System Biology Award” from the Weizmann Institute of Science.